Re: Why check legacy partition table for non-legacy HDs?

[Andrew Clausen]

On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 03:11:13PM -0700, H. J. Lu wrote:
> See
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=72686
> 
> My question why parted even bothers with number of cylinders > 1024
> for legacy stuff. Linux's fdisk doesn't. Here is a patch.

cylinders > 1024 is a bad heuristic.  (What does hard disk size have
to do with the BIOS version?)

fdisk doesn't need to worry as much (although it should...), because it
doesn't have to do resizing (i.e. it doesn't have to modify entries).

> +     /* Never bother with number of cylinders > 1024 for legacy
> +        stuff. It is stupid and pointless.  */
> +     if (disk->dev->cylinders > 1024)
> +             return 1;

This will break some BIOSes.

Cheers,
Andrew